The 10 Best Documentaries Of 2016 That Are Trying To Change The World

Had your fill of Oscar-baiting plots and overwrought performances? Have a look at the best non-fiction films of the year

By
Nick Schager

20/12/2016

While high-profile dramas continue to dominate the ongoing award season, let us not forget the many phenomenal documentaries that were bestowed upon us over the past twelve months. Covering an extensive range of subject matter, from notorious criminal cases and political scandals to American race relations and music concerts, the cream of this year's non-fiction crop cast an incisive eye on compelling people and unforgettable events, in the process revealing underling truths about the way in which we view ourselves, the world, and those with whom we share it. Upsetting, enraging and exciting, they were—no matter the genre—as good as anything projected on a big screen in 2016.

10. I Am Not Your Negro

James Baldwin's fiery, poetic prose about U.S. race relations (and the American psyche) is lionised by Raoul Peck's documentary, which is less a straightforward biopic than a lyrical tribute to his outspoken views. In low tones that belie the fury and sorrow of what's being expressed, Samuel L. Jackson narrates Baldwin's writings, which—whether about his relationship to Malcolm X, Medgar Evers, and Martin Luther King Jr., or about how movies starring John Wayne and Sidney Poitier helped illuminate whites' true feelings about African-Americans—reveal a burning desire to examine, confront, and lay bare ideas about racial subjugation and dehumanisation. Even if one doesn't wholly subscribe to Baldwin's "hopelessness" over such issues, or completely buy Peck's attempts to directly correlate current events with those of the Civil Rights era, I Am Not Your Negro proves a fascinating window into Baldwin's fiercely intellectual headspace.

9. Tower

America has become inured to news of school shootings, so it's a considerable achievement that Tower—a stylistically daring documentary about the first such incident, on the University of Texas at Austin's campus in 1966—is, from its first few moments, unbearably bracing. Using a combination of rotoscopic animation (over actors reenacting first-person testimonials), archival news footage, and recent interviews with some of the players during that fateful day, Keith Maitland's film thrusts one into the tumultuous horror of the attack, which was perpetrated by a lone sniper positioned near the top of the school's clock tower. Ultimately resulting in 14 deaths and 32 injuries, the siege is depicted in agonising detail that hammers home—with visceral impact—the chaos wrought by the killer, the tragedy of his crime, and the stirring courage of those who risked their own safety to help others.

8. Kate Plays Christine

Documentarian Robert Greene's 2014 release Actress was concerned with the blurry line between reality and fiction, and that boundary is re-addressed, in even more compelling form, in Kate Plays Christine, a quasi-documentary in which actress Kate Lyn Sheil prepares to star in a (not-real) biopic about Christine Chubbuck, the Sarasota, Florida TV newscaster who notoriously killed herself on-air in 1974. As she researches and rehearses for this role, Sheil expresses sentiments (about being viewed as manly, and about her desire to be seen) that echo those reportedly felt by Chubbock. Before long, the actress is wracked by doubts about the usefulness—and responsibility—of re-enacting a public suicide that Chubbock meant to serve as a critique of media bloodlust, but has in subsequent years arguably become an example of the very thing it was intended to censure. Then again, is Sheil even acting in these supposedly candid moments? Greene's inquisitive, haunting film remains ambiguous to its end.

7. Zero Days

Alex Gibney is a one-man documentary cottage industry, churning out movies at a speed that makes even Woody Allen's one-feature-a-year pace look lazy by comparison. While his prolific productivity often hampers quality, he proves to be in fine form with Zero Days, a suspenseful behind-the-scenes account of the Stuxnet worm, a deadly computer virus that was discovered by a Belarus security expert, and which turned out to be the means by which the U.S government hacked, and sabotaged, Iran's Natanz nuclear facilities. If Stuxnet seemed like something out of a 007 adventure, its capabilities—it could operate without being connected to the Internet, and it was programmed to fulfill its mission without any input from a human user—seemed more apt for a techno-horror film. Though Gibney's bombshell revelations were preempted by news reports, he nonetheless paints a terrifying picture of a near-future (i.e. NOW) in which secret, catastrophic war can be waged with the press of a single button.

6. Cameraperson

Kristen Johnson is the cinematographer behind a raft of high-profile documentaries, including Fahrenheit 9/11 and Citizenfour. While she again wields the camera for her own Cameraperson, however, it's Johnson herself who is the focus of this unique non-fiction essay—or, rather, it's the role of the cinematographer that proves to be her prime area of interest. Comprised of scenes shot by Johnson for various projects, from a Brooklyn arena's locker room during a boxing match to a Nigerian hospital where a midwife delivers babies with scant resources, the film functions as an open-ended question about the level of engagement a photographer should have with his or her subjects. Be it the sight of a young boy tussling dangerously over an axe, or Johnson's own mother struggling with Alzheimer's, the filmmaker's critical-theory collage grapples with her own role as a witness, an advocate, a reporter, and a human being.

5. Lo and Behold: Reveries of the Connected World

There may be no documentarian more enthralled and terrified by the world's vast, expansive wonders than Werner Herzog, whose non-fiction cinema consistently investigates the far reaches of the planet and the human spirit. For his latest gem, the director casts his gaze on a virtual space—the Internet—to provide an episodic study of the ways in which we benefit from, and may yet fall victim to, interconnectivity. Far from simply a "The Sky is Falling!" doomsday proclamation, however, Herzog's film is amazed by the innovation that we now take for granted (such as the Internet itself, of which no sci-fi writer ever conceived). Nonetheless, there's also dread here, spawned by the realization that our dawning digitised paradigm is reconfiguring (if not outright warping) our emotional, social, and moral standards. Caught between celebration and condemnation, it's a thoughtful consideration of the implications of our new world order.

4. Justin Timberlake + The Tennessee Kids

Be it his Talking Heads gem Stop Making Sense or his reverential Neil Young: Heart of Gold,Jonathan Demme's concert films document phenomenal live performances via slyly expressive aesthetics. That's again the case with Justin Timberlake + The Tennessee Kids, a record of the pop star's last two shows of his 20/20 Experience World Tour, held at Las Vegas' MGM Grand in January 2015. Running through hits and covers with confidence and enthusiasm, Timberlake proves to be a grand entertainer, as well as one confident enough to realize that sharing the spotlight with his band—an enormous outfit of horn players, back-up singers and dancers, and guitarists and percussionists—only enhances his larger-than-life persona. Demme's stunning camerawork always seems positioned to capture the key moment on the right note, and in his panoramas of Timberlake and company on stage—and on a platform hovering over the crowd—he conveys the collaborative artistry that's essential to the headliner's greatness.

3. Weiner

Anthony Weiner was a New York congressman whose career was derailed when, in 2011, his habit of sending photos of himself in underwear to women who weren't his wife, Huma Abedin, was exposed. Josh Kriegman and Elyse Steinberg's film details that catastrophe before sidling up next to Weiner during his subsequent 2013 campaign for Mayor of New York—which, as has been well-documented, was sabotaged by further revelations of bad online behavior. Kriegman and Steinberg's up-close-and-personal access to Weiner during this second tabloid-ready scandal is astounding, and allows for a raw, unvarnished and cringe-inducingly candid view of a politician striving to crawl out of a hole that he dug for himself, only to succumb once again to his own failings. It's never less than gripping—and in the figure of Hillary Clinton right-hand-woman Abedin, here reduced to suffering yet another public betrayal at the hands of her husband, it's also quietly heartbreaking.

2. Gleason

A film to make even the most cold-hearted moviegoer well up with tears, J. Clay Tweel's Gleason is akin to a real-life counterpart to 1993's My Life—a fictional drama in which a dying Michael Keaton records video diaries for the yet-to-be-born child he'll never see grow up. In this documentary, the man who sets about on that quest is former New Orleans Saints safety Steve Gleason, who after being diagnosed with ALS, begins creating testimonials of himself and his thoughts for his unborn (and then young) child. More than just a weepy, however, this non-fiction work is also a rousing testament to Gleason's fight against the debilitating (and fatal) disease, which he combats alongside his wife Michel, with the two eventually creating a foundation to help support others struck with the affliction.

1. O.J.: Made in America

Ezra Edelman's doc is a work into which you sink, so deep is its wealth of information—and insights—about its subject's upbringing, his view of himself (and his place in the world), and the reasons his murder of Nicole Brown Simpson and Ronald Goldman sparked such a nationwide uproar. With new interviews from virtually every key player involved in this long-running saga, it wastes not a second of its nearly eight-hour runtime, instead proving to be a deftly edited magnum opus about fame, race, ambition, and rage. Whether binged in one sitting or consumed in installments, it's a gripping and illuminating socio-cultural critique—and a tragedy about one man's self-inflicted fall from grace—that epitomises the term "must-watch."

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